


there's a turn in the road we've been taking (let it set you free)

by poiesis



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Bodyswap, Butch Kara Danvers, F/F, Fake Marriage, Friends to Lovers, Lesbian Kara Danvers, Lesbian Lena Luthor, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, x-files au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-11 05:36:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12928614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poiesis/pseuds/poiesis
Summary: "Agent Luthor, do you believe in the existence of extra-terrestrials?"--supercorp x-files au, or, for the uninformed: supercorp fbi agents embroiled in a government conspiracy who fall in love over seven years of unresolved sexual tension au





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this will earn its rating and half of the tags in upcoming chapters, sorry to be a tease. thank you to hayley, seabiscuits, and anneka for your encouragement and ideas! title from "thinking of a place" by the war on drugs.

She meets Special Agent Kara Danvers for the first time in a basement. She feels a bit stiff in her tailored skirt and blazer next to Danvers – tie loosened and askew, shirtsleeves unbuttoned and rolled up past her elbows, badge and gun resting in a heap next to the overflowing pencil holder on the office’s single desk. Still, she offers her hand. Danvers takes it warmly in her larger one, and welcomes her to the X-Files.

“So, whose bad side did you get on?” Danvers asks her, feeding slides into a carousel projector as Lena studies the grainy photos and vaguely scientific charts wallpapering the office.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Y’know, who’d you tick off to get this detail?” Lena turns to study her, raising an eyebrow. Danvers seems a bit self-conscious, avoiding her gaze, smoothing her short hair back. Close-cropped blonde waves that would make more sense on a pro surfer than a government employee. She rubs at the buzzed part at the nape of her neck, ducking her head. _Bashful_ , Lena thinks. _Cute_ , says a far more foolish part of her brain.

“Actually, I’m looking forward to working with you. I’ve heard a lot about you.” She had. Kara “Supergirl” Danvers was infamous at the Academy by the time Lena started there, despite Danvers only graduating a year before. There were whispers about wasted potential, about how she had annihilated all the records for physical performance and scored near-perfectly on all the theoretical exams, only to throw it all away in pursuit of her very particular interests ( _aliens_ of all things, Lena had heard), catching demotion after demotion until she ended up here.

“Oh really? I was under the impression you were sent down here to spy on me, Luthor.” As disheveled as Danvers is, squirreled away amongst her subterranean horde, it isn’t hard for Lena to imagine that the woman in front of her was once the FBI’s golden girl when Danvers flashes her a handsome smile.

Their first case is in Oregon, and Lena sees that same smile again when Danvers notices how hard Lena grips her armrest during turbulence on the flight over.

“I hate flying. I know statistically it’s the safest way to travel, but still.” Lena takes a shaky breath and Danvers’ answering grin makes Lena want to slap her a little bit, despite how charming it is. Lena gets the feeling she’ll be on a lot of flights with this assignment.

“You’re safe now.” Danvers jokes when the turbulence clears, nudging Lena’s arm with her elbow. “Look, we’re nearly landed.” Lena chances a look at the window and sees green forest, the same one the victims were found in.

There’s kids turning up dead, all from the same graduating class, all with the same distinctive marks on their lower backs. Lena and Danvers exhume Ray Soames, the third victim, and there’s a monkey in the coffin where his corpse should be. They argue over the body of said monkey in the cramped basement of the Bellefleur Funeral Home while Danvers snaps a ridiculous amount of pictures with her large flash camera, Lena extracts a weird looking bar of metal from the monkey’s nasal cavity that Danvers insists it’s _extra-terrestrial_ of all things, and Lena discovers that the whispers at the Academy are both entirely accurate and very, very off. Kara Danvers believes in aliens, but she isn’t crazy. Kara Danvers is driven. And Kara Danvers thinks she’s a spy.

“I was twelve when it happened. My cousin was eight. He disappeared out of his bed one night. Just gone, vanished. No note, no phone calls, no evidence of anything.” Danvers tells her on their first night in Oregon, sitting on the floor of her own hotel room while Lena sits at the top of the bed surrounded by x-rays and paperwork. The power’s out, a storm working over them outside.

“You never found him?”

Danvers shakes her head, adjusts her glasses. A deep sadness passes over her face that makes Lena want to reach out and touch. She’s not used to such bare emotion, not from her family or from her work. Lena has a practiced mask for every occasion.

“Tore the whole family apart. There were no facts to confirm, nothing to offer any hope. Alex, my older sister, took it the hardest. Clark and I were adopted but she was the Danvers’ biological daughter. She thought she was meant to protect the both of us. No one could talk about it.”

“What did you do?”

Danvers readjusts, still resting against the bed but with her head tilted back and angled towards Lena to look at her. Her eyes are soft in a way that makes Lena wonder how many people have asked for this story.

“Eventually, I went off to school in England. The FBI recruited me when I came back, told me I had ‘a natural aptitude for applying behavioural criminal models to criminal cases’.” Her air quotes are exaggerated and she laughs a little, rubs the back of her neck in that same shy way she did that first day in the office.

“They liked me. They were grooming me, I think, to be an A.D. one day. It gave me some freedom to pursue my own interests. And that's when I came across the X-Files.”

“By accident?”

Danvers takes off her glasses and starts cleaning them with the fabric of her grey thermal shirt that stretches soft over her muscular shoulders. The rain lets up a bit outside.

“At first it looked like a garbage dump for UFO sightings, alien abduction reports, the kind of stuff that most people laugh at as being ridiculous. But I was fascinated. I read all the cases I could get my hands on, hundreds of them.” She sighs, and looks at Lena almost apologetically. “There’s classified government information I’ve been trying to access, but someone’s been blocking my attempts to get at it.”

Lena sits up and leans forward, squints at her in the near-darkness. “Who? I don’t…I don’t understand.”

“Someone at a higher level of power. The only reason I've been allowed to continue with my work is because I've made connections in congress.”

“And they're afraid of what? That…that you'll leak this information?”

Shadows from water running down the windowpane fall across Danvers’ face. “You're a part of that agenda, you know that.”

“I'm not a part of any agenda, Danvers. You've got to trust me. They gave me this assignment but I _swear_ to you, I’m not one of them. I'm here just like you, to solve this.”

Danvers moves closer to her, kneeling, hands grasping the dingy comforter close to Lena’s thigh.

“I'm telling you this, Luthor, because you need to know, because of what you've seen. In my research, I've worked with a doctor who’s taken me through deep regression hypnosis. I've been able to go into my own repressed memories to the night my cousin disappeared.” Lena huffs in disbelief before she can stop herself, but Danvers continues, unfazed. “I remember, Luthor. I remember a light outside. I remember a presence in the room. But I was paralyzed,” A chill goes through Lena. “I couldn’t answer Clark's calls for help. I could hear them, but I couldn’t move.”

Lena is speechless. This close she can see wildness in Danvers’ eyes, a shade of something haunted falling over the wholesome farmboy look of her, something that furrows an earnest crease between her eyebrows.

“Listen to me, Luthor, this thing exists. The government knows about it, and I’ve got to know what they’re hiding. Nothing else matters to me,” Is loneliness the haunted thing? “And this is as close as I’ve ever gotten to it.”

The tinny ring of Danvers’ phone startles them both. Whoever’s on the other end (a woman’s voice, she doesn’t give her name) tells them Peggy O’Dell is dead, run down by an 18-wheeler despite having been interviewed by Lena and Danvers from the wheelchair she was bound to just that afternoon. Lena’s mind reels even as she’s checking over O’Dell’s body, thinking about Danvers’ young cousin, stolen out of his room at night, thinking about how she could earn this woman’s trust, thinking about if it were even possible to do so.

“Oh no. No no no. No!” Danvers says as their car mounts the curb of the hotel carpark after they visit the scene, the lot jammed with a fire truck and three police cars. Smoke rolls off the building in waves, confined to the couple of rooms on the end, their rooms. Ablaze.

“There goes my computer.” She says above the din, at a loss as to what else she could say.

“Damn it!” Danvers’ voice is raw and she paces along the concrete, frantic. “The x-rays! The pictures!” Lena places her hand on Danvers’ arm to still her and Danvers crumples to her knees on the wet ground, hands covering her face.

“We lost everything.”

“Not everything, Danvers.” Lena shakes the small phial in front of her face, makes the metal bar she’d taken out of whatever was in Ray Soame’s coffin chime against the glass. Danvers looks up at her and _beams_ , flames reflected in her glasses and rainwater in her hair. She bites her lip and Lena’s heart kicks against her ribs.

“Thank you.”

If Danvers is in deep, then Lena is right there with her.

\----------------

Intimacy comes fast when you’re working as close as they are. Especially when that work necessitates regular intervals of both travel and peril, and frequent late-night crisis meetings in Kara’s trashed apartment, untangling a case and trying to avoid getting stuck on the way the murky glow of her fish tank lit up Luthor’s eyes and cast ripples over her skin.

Kara isn’t really surprised, then, when Luthor knocks at her door at 1am about a year and a half into their partnership. It’s not like she was sleeping, or anything – she’d get an even 3 hours around 4am after she ran out of sunflower seeds and the midnight B-movies gave way to early morning fitness programs (the perky, neon-spandexed presenters of _Aerobics Now!_ grated on her fragile nerves). Their flight out of Georgia was at 9. Plenty of time.

“Danvers? It’s me.” Kara knew that before she crossed the room to open the door – she could place Luthor’s signature staccato knock anywhere.

“I need to ask you a favour.” Is Luthor _blushing_? She’s avoiding Kara’s eyes, folding the edge of her shirt into a concertina and unfolding it again, slightly frantic.

“Of course, Luthor. Is everything ok? What can I do?”

“Uh, well, I’m sure you noticed how hot it was today as we were examining the Fairfield scene for evidence. So I took my jacket off. But I didn’t, uh, foresee how little my shirt would protect me against the sun. Or I didn’t foresee how easily I would burn. Either way, I’m sunburnt. Badly.”

This is maybe the fastest Kara had ever heard Luthor talk. Kara opens her mouth to speak, but she’s cut off.

“And I need your help. I bought some aloe vera gel from the drugstore,” Ah, so that’s why Luthor smells somehow better than usual (and ‘usual’ was very, very good). “And I’ve already taken care of the uh…front of my torso. But I can’t reach all of my back, especially when my arms hurt this badly. And I was wondering if you could um, apply some to the rest for me, please.”

Kara tries to keep her soul firmly contained within her body. Near death situations, she can handle. She can handle being in the heat of battle with Luthor, running from perps, and after perps, and throwing herself over Luthor to protect her from bullets in the locker room shower of a high school run by Satanists, and checking the back of Luthor’s elegant neck for mind-controlling parasites just a stone’s throw from the North Pole. Even if she feels, sometimes, like letting the adrenaline carry her over to the inevitability of hooking her finger under Luthor’s chin and kissing her soundly, just to taste the victory on her lips, especially when Luthor gives her that nearly rabid grin that says “Holy shit, we _survived_ ”, she can handle it. But nudity, of any kind, was an undiscovered frontier.

(On Kara’s part, anyway. She was 99% sure that Luthor had seen her without a shirt when she pulled a bullet out of her chest that one time, but she was unconscious or just can't remember, so Kara’s only 50% embarrassed about it.)

Kara hopes she doesn’t sit there, agog, for as long as it feels like she does. It’s long enough for Luthor to start saying “Well?” but Kara jumps in.

“I’ll help! I’ll help. I will…yeah, I’ll help.”

Luthor looks relieved and extremely embarrassed, the combination sunburn-and-blush on her cheeks deepening in colour. Luthor nods, and moves to unbutton her shirt.

“Right, so I’ll just…” She says, looking at Kara pointedly, and Kara snaps out of it and looks away with a quick apology. There’s the whisper of Luthor’s shirt hitting the ugly hotel armchair, and then the snap of the aloe vera bottle opening.

“Ok, I’m ready.”

And oh god, there she is. Bare arms, long sweep of spine like God had pressed a fingernail line into her when she was still clay, two perfect dimples in her lower back that make something animal in Kara rise up and riot. But the thrill of seeing all this new skin is tempered by genuine sympathy, because _ouch_. Kara’s fairly certain that her glasses actually fog up a little from the heat radiating off Luthor’s back.

“Oh jeez, that looks really painful. I’ll just, uh…” Kara takes the bottle from her and squeezes some into her palm. Luthor jumps at the first touch of her hands on her upper back (a safe start, Kara reasons, to get herself under control before she had to go anywhere near the deeply feminine contours of Luthor’s waist and hips).

“Cold.” Luthor manages through gritted teeth, letting out a sigh as Kara starts to move. “Feels good though.”

“Th-that’s good.” Kara pushes Lena’s dark ponytail over her shoulder with the back of her hand to smooth gel over the nape of her neck. She avoids getting any on the dreamy mint fabric of Luthor’s bra, which she’s quietly surprised by, because she’d imagined black, or red ( _not_ that she had pictured Luthor in her underwear, because that would be very unprofessional, and she’s all about maintaining professionalism).

“You know, I…” Her voice cracks and she clears her throat, mentally kicking herself for sounding like a literal teenage boy at a time like this. “I, uh, had a sneaking suspicion that you might be a vampire when we first met. And I think you might’ve confirmed it today. Maybe I should start a file on you, Luthor.”

That earns a laugh and a bit of the tension in Luthor’s body eases. She turns her head, graceful muscles in her neck standing out, and tries to peer over at Kara but can’t quite see to fix her with a sharp look.

“Watch your back, Danvers. You might want to invest in some garlic if you keep teasing me like that.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll take it easy on you.”

There’s a funny tan line (or burn line?) where the sun was blocked by Luthor’s midback holster. Luthor’s gun wasn’t as weighty as Kara’s SIG-Sauer but she didn’t carry it on her hip like Kara did, leaving the hourglass of her figure uninterrupted by hardware. Kara rolls her eyes at her own train of thought.

“I don’t think I've been burnt this badly since I was a child.”

Good, maybe if Luthor keeps talking through this Kara can distract herself enough to fight the mutinous urge to let her hands wander around to the gentle swell of Luthor’s stomach and up to…well, _up_.

“Oh yeah?”

“Lex took me fishing one summer when I was little. He gave me one of his old t-shirts to wear but it was so big on me that most of my back got burnt and I spent the afternoon in a cold bath, with every teabag Lex could find in the house floating in it. My mother was _furious_.”

“Ha, did it work?”

“It might have if they’d been bags of actual tea instead of herbal stuff. I reeked of chamomile for days.”

Kara laughs and gets Luthor’s lower back quickly, trying not to linger. It helps if she’s not actually looking at her so she stares resolutely ahead, but makes the mistake of catching their reflection in the window, where she sees the long fall of Luthor’s hair resting between her—

“All done!” Kara says brightly and turns around, away from the window and her nearly half naked partner who she _definitely_ shouldn’t be thinking of like this. She takes a couple of deep breaths to calm her racing heart.

“You can look now Danvers, I’m decent again.” There’s a dangerous humour in Luthor’s voice. She has one less button done up than usual.

“Thanks for your help, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No worries. Anytime, Luthor.”

“Well, goodnight. Oh and Danvers?”

“Yeah?”

Luthor looks over her shoulder before heading out the door, mouth quirked up in a teasing grin.

“You can stop blushing now. You’re nearly as red as me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading, my tumblr is @weirddyke if you wanna yell at me about this :^)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter earns us the bed sharing tag and the explicit rating. a few people asked me whether i'll be writing a supercorp version of every episode of the x-files, and while i wish i could accomplish that, i'm not. each chapter is two years in the life of their partnership inspired by a specific episode from the corresponding season of the x-files. in future chapters i'll be drawing from arcadia, dreamland i and ii, and requiem (eye emoji). thanks again to hayley, seabiscuit, and anneka <3

Lena Luthor is _not_ jealous. Not in the least. She’s been quiet for nearly the entire duration of their dinner at a truckstop just outside of Miller’s Falls, thinking. And maybe sighing, flexing her jaw; maybe giving Danvers one-to-two-word responses to any questions or comments aimed her way. But she’s not jealous, and she’s certainly not brooding her way across New England deep in the throes of that jealousy.

Danvers is in pain, clearly. Lena catches her uneasy, hangdog expression that says, “Please tell me what’s wrong and please let me fix it”, each time she looks over in her direction from her plate of greasy food. And she had asked that question in so many words, a few times actually, since they left.

“You feeling ok, Luthor?”

“Sure am, Danvers.”

Then, later:

“Did you sleep ok last night, Luthor?”

“I slept fine.”

And finally, most recently:

“Do you want the last of my fries, Luthor?”

(That was how Lena knew Danvers was really desperate.)

Just because she isn’t jealous, exactly, doesn’t mean there isn’t something up with Lena Luthor. Something, some _one_ , had unsettled her.

Danvers had called her to Massachusetts after a long evening of phone-based updates about what seemed to be a series of cockroach-related deaths. One such call featured Lena providing yet another extensive explanation as to why the visitation of extra-terrestrial life to this planet would be unfeasible, to which Danvers replied, voice dropped dangerously low, “Luthor, what are you wearing?”

(Lena got up to check her thermostat after that one. It had seemed awfully hot in her apartment all of a sudden.)

When she arrived at the Miller’s Falls address the next day, a flight and a long rental car drive later, the name ‘Bambi’ is echoing in her mind. Dr. Bambi Berembaum, entomologist and apparent ally to Danvers’ current case, sounded like the name of a character from some science fiction farce with a vague title like _The Blob_ or _The Thing_.

Danvers had sounded somewhat taken with this woman over the phone. Lena had put that down to finding a kindred spirit, down to Danvers meeting someone with a fresh take on UFOs (“Her theory is that they’re actually nocturnal insect swarms passing through electrical air fields! Can you believe that, Luthor?”). She banishes the _other_ possibility far from her mind, unsure of why it even occurred to her in the first place.

But when she saw Bambi for the first time from her car, her stomach dropped. She was gorgeous, and not too far from the voluptuous caricature of a B-movie doctor that Lena had conjured up on her drive. And, worryingly, based on her outfit of flannel shirt, short shorts, and hiking boots, Danvers might just have a chance at getting with her.

 _Or_ , Lena thought, trying to keep her blood from boiling at the sight of Danvers preening under this woman’s attention, leaning into Bambi’s just-casual-enough-to-be-flirty touch on her arm, giving her that easy smile and twinkling her eyes at her, _maybe she already had_.

The drive and their dinner had been filled with hundreds of instant replays of that moment, and the question of ‘Did they?’ knocking around Lena’s head.

Why does she feel so _weird_ about this wholly unconfirmed possibility? It was clear enough to Lena that Danvers was attracted to the inimitable Dr Berenbaum, having seen the signs enough herself for the past few years. She isn’t jealous, no, because she had no romantic claim or even interest in Danvers. Yes, it’s something else. She took a fry from Danvers’ plate and chewed slowly, sensing the answer to this problem just beyond the horizon of her mind. _Ah, that’s it._ The explanation is obvious. She feels weird about Danvers flirting with that stupidly named bug expert because it was…unprofessional of her. She was on a case at the time, after all! Not necessarily a Bureau-assigned case, but she was there on the Bureau’s behalf, that was for certain.

She smiles a little at her epiphany until the pious voice of her conscience reminds her that to outsiders some of _her_ behaviour towards Danvers would be considered unprofessional. But, of course, it isn’t that simple. The truth, the one that Lena was loath to admit to herself, is that it’s _way_ too easy for Danvers to get under her skin. Even the simplest things set her off – Danvers holstering or unholstering her gun, Danvers chewing on the end of a pencil, Danvers pursing her lips to gingerly sip too-hot coffee, the state of Danvers’ short hair when Lena turned up at her apartment early in the morning (ruffled from sleep, far too reminiscent of what it would look like if Lena ran her fingers through it, or pulled at it), Danvers rolling her shirtsleeves up to reveal forearms that had a capable grace and a tan that lasts all year round. All of these things, and indeed Danvers herself, as a whole, evoked an all too recognisable heat in Lena, one that crept up the back of her neck, drew colour to her cheeks, settled heavy between her legs. It was a problem. But it was a problem that she had, so far, successfully circumvented. She’d grown adept at handling it, hiding it, through the powers of deflection.

She knows Danvers finds her attractive, she hardly needs superhuman hearing to measure it with Danvers’ heartrate seeing as her face was an open book – a frequently blushing, lip-biting, lingering look-ing open book. So naturally, Lena capitalised on that. She did her best to be at the front-foot of every little tete a tete, steadfast enough to keep from revealing to Danvers what exactly her physical presence stirred in her. She employed certain comments, certain touches and actions (inclining her head deferentially when Danvers opened the car door for her, for example, or smiling at her in a way that stole speech from her partner altogether) to knock Danvers just that little bit off balance.

And just because it was for the sake of professional harmony didn’t mean that it wasn’t a bit of fun, too. She rarely got a chance to flirt with women anymore, hadn’t touched any that weren’t on her operating table in an embarrassingly long time. It kept things light (and oh how they needed it in their line of work), it passed the time. Even though she intellectualised it, rationalised it, she knew that in the simplest terms it came down to this: Danvers was a dish, and Lena loved to watch her squirm.

“Bad news, Luthor.” Danvers breaks Lena’s train of thought, fidgeting with the antenna on her cellphone. “There’s a severe weather warning for D.C. No flights in or out until tomorrow, at least.” She presents this piece of news with the hesitation of a dog that had been kicked one too many times, and relaxes noticeably when Lena doesn’t immediately roll her eyes or scream. Her realisation had taken her uneasiness away for the time being.

“Looks like we’ll be spending the night, then.” She offers a tired smile to Danvers who returns it with a palpable sense of relief.

“It looks that way. C’mon, I’ll get the cheque.”

There’s only one room left in the motel. Lena’s surprised that it’s taken three years for this to happen, given that they’ve spent many impromptu nights in many highway-adjacent motels of varying quality (the most memorable was the one with what Lena thought was a dead mouse in the light fitting, until she switched it on and it _moved_ ). There isn’t another chance to stop for the night until the next town, an hour away. Weary and sore from being cooped up in the car, they take it.

She concedes the first shower to Danvers who, Lena knew by circumstantial evidence alone, would be wracked with guilt over this entire misadventure. She toes off her pumps and watches the news, stretching out her stockinged feet and snacking on minibar peanuts. Danvers emerges from the shower after a while, a lock of wet hair falling in her face, and straight away she grabs one of the pillows on the queen-sized bed and starts arranging herself on the floor.

“Danvers.”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“You can take the bed Luthor, I’ll be alright here.” The carpet is a grim shade of what could’ve been orange, many years ago. Danvers spreads out a fleecy blanket with satin edging and sprawls out on top of it.

“Don’t be stupid, Danvers. This floor would light up like a Christmas tree with a couple of sprays of Luminol. It’s a big bed, we can share.” She schools surety into her voice. It’s a big bed, yes. But she doesn’t know how successful that ‘sharing’ will be.

Danvers smiles at her gratefully and practically swan-dives onto the bed with her pillow in hand, reaching for the remote to find something trashier than _60 Minutes_ on the fuzzy TV set opposite.

She’s in that same position when Lena finishes up in the bathroom. There’s a strange flutter of nerves in her stomach at the sight of Danvers stretched out on the bed, long and lean, cast in coloured light from the TV. Her boxers have little foxes on them. Lena gets under the covers without a word, and Danvers switches the TV off, plunging them into darkness interrupted only by a few beams of red ‘NO VACANCY’ light filtering through the blinds.

“You can leave it on if you want, Danvers. I don’t mind.”

“No, it’s ok.”

“Aren’t you going to stay up?” Lena hadn’t known Danvers to sleep unless chemically sedated or deathly ill. Or recovering from a gunshot.

“I’m pretty tired.”

“You? Tired? Wow, maybe something was up with those cockroaches. Did any of the victims report dramatic changes to their sleeping habits?”

Danvers laughs at that, and Lena shifts to lie on her side and look at Danvers in profile. “No I . . . I don’t have trouble sleeping when I’m with someone, I mean, when there’s someone uh, in bed with me.” Lena raises an eyebrow as Danvers fumbles her way out of that slight innuendo, only making her stutter intensify. “I’m only an insomniac when I’m on my own.” She concludes, and she smiles up at the ceiling almost wistfully.

Lena's face burns in the dark, that sick feeling (not jealousy, professional outrage) rising in her again. “And this is something you’ve experienced recently?” She drags her voice down to the pitch that’s sure to send Danvers into a blushing tailspin. Best to catch her off guard to get the most honest answer, to satisfy her concern regarding Agent Danvers’ unprofessional conduct.

It has its desired effect. Danvers opens and closes her mouth a few unsuccessful times before she says “What?”, voice raising above the hushed tones they’d been speaking with before. “Sorry, I mean, no. Not, uh . . . not for a while now.”

Danvers looks embarrassed, fidgeting with the top of the comforter. Guilt and heady relief fight within Lena, the intensity of both stealing her verbal filter.

“Me neither.”

“Oh.” Danvers offers, and Lena cringes in the silence, mutual admissions hanging heavy in the air. Of all the ill-fated times to bring up sex, the moment before spending the night with her partner whose warm presence beside her was all too enticing would’ve had to be the worst.

“Well don’t count on a good night’s sleep, Danvers.” She says, trying to erase whatever tense energy she’d summoned into their water-stained lodgings. “You don’t know for a fact that I don’t snore. Or kick.”

Danvers laughs again, that quiet, tired one that triggers an easy sleepiness in Lena like Pavlov. “I doubt it, Sleeping Beauty. Nice PJs, by the way.”

The silence after that is considerably more comfortable, until she hears Danvers sigh and shift beside her. Lena can almost hear her thinking over what she’s about to say.

“Hey Luthor?”

“Yeah, Danvers?

“I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here for nothing.”

Lena sighs and rolls over to face Danvers again, who looks at her with big, sad eyes filled with apologies. Lena tries not to let it break her heart.

“You know, Danvers, we spend a lot of time driving through neighbourhoods, and towns, and cities, all filled with people who are raising families and buying homes and playing with their kids and dogs and in short, living their lives.” Danvers turns over to face her in the dark, eyebrows pinched with pain. “I see the lights in their windows, and there’s a story behind each one. A life. And the closer we get to the truth, the closer they get to living those lives free from a government who doesn’t care about the people it governs. I don’t know if the proof you’re looking for is the answer, but I know you’re doing what’s right. _We’re_ doing what’s right.” She looks up at the ceiling. It’s easy to say this without looking at Danvers, easy to tell secrets in the dark. “And I wouldn’t put myself on the line for anyone but you.”

“Do you mean that?” Danvers’ voice is smaller than she’s ever heard it.

“Of course I do.” There’s a weight between them again, and Danvers is still, possibly not even breathing. “Now go to sleep, we’ve had a long day.”

Danvers holds her gaze and smiles before turning away from her. “I’m so lucky to have you, Luthor.”

“I’m lucky, too,” is what she wants to say. Because she is, she realises with an overwhelming surge of affection. It’s the two of them against the world in more ways than one. As frustrating as Danvers was at times (gifted with a seemingly unending supply of remote locations to drag her to and hairbrained theories to explain preach to her), she has her company in a world of people who are mostly strangers to them. She pushed her, challenged her, supported her despite the difference in their views and despite the obstacles set up against them in their now-shared quest. But more than that, just _being_ with Danvers was like a refuge to her. She got to spend nearly every day with a woman she’d see on the street and recognise as one of her own by simple sight. It was in the way Danvers lived unambiguously, wearing her heart on her rolled up sleeves and in her walk and in every rental car tape deck, which starred a consistent rotation of Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang's discographies that she took on all their assignments. And beside her, sometimes, Lena felt seen.

Once when they were at Quantico for a conference they shared an elevator with two young recruits. Both women were sporting fine, neat crewcuts, their uniforms leaving none of their strength to the imagination. She flushes again thinking about the easy nod they gave Danvers that she returned, the ghost of a smile around her lips and recognition shining in her eyes. Standing in front of them as they ascended to the assistant directors’ floor, Lena could feel the two women watching her. She chased that feeling, sensing the way their eyes traced the outline of her body hugged tight by her skirt and blouse like a soft, electrifying touch. Their attention, like Danvers’ attention, thrilled her in equal measure to how much she hated the weighted looks from male agents she passed in the hallway. She knew the recruits saw how Danvers placed a hand at the small of her back to usher her out of the elevator, and she wondered if they thought she and Danvers were fucking. Part of her hoped they did.

“I’m so lucky. I thought I had a path before you but it was nothing compared to the one we’re on now. It scares me how much I need this. It scares me how much I need you. It scares me how much I want you,” is what she wants to say. The words and unexpected tears choke at her throat.

“Sweet dreams, Danvers,” is what she says instead.

More than anything in that moment Lena wants to touch her, to breach the thick aura of decorum and fear between them and scrape her nails against the soft shaved hair at the nape of her neck, or curl her arm over the broadness of Danvers’ back and rest her nose against the soft cotton of her t-shirt. She smells like motel soap and the faintest reminder of her usual cologne. She wants to inhale it and hold it in her lungs forever. The compulsion hits her like a wave.

The strength of that feeling must carry over into sleep, given how she wakes up. Lena’s tucked into Danvers’ side, one of her partner’s arms slung around shoulders and holding her close. One of her legs is sandwiched by Danvers’ muscular ones, soft hair on Danvers’ calves tickling her bare skin. The firmness of Danvers’ hipbone is pressed all-too-nicely against her centre.

In her just-woken state it takes a moment for Lena to process all of this information, but when she does she all but falls out of bed, running on pure panic alone and not caring whether Danvers is woken up in the process. Mercifully, she sleeps on. It’s a cold morning but the warmth from all the places she and Danvers had been touching lingers and follows her, follows her into the bathroom, follows her into the shower and under the messy spray of frigid water she stands beneath for as long as she can take.

It stays even as she shivers under her towel. Her final attempt to extinguish it is with one hand braced on the sink and the other moving mercilessly between her legs, her body thrumming with heat that won’t recede. All she wants to do is moan. She bites at the soft flesh of her inner arm to quiet herself – hard enough to leave a mark, not hard enough to keep from whimpering a little as pleasure crashes over her. The thought of Danvers waking to the sound of her getting off sends Lena over the edge. And the heat fades, for now.

She tries not to think about how long it’s been since someone held her like that. She tries not to think about how she wants it again. And, of course, she tries not to think about who she wants it with. But, sitting across from Danvers in another diner, watching her spread jelly on burnt toast and spilling crumbs over her newspaper, she knows that’s easier said than done.

\----------------

They’re waiting for the local law to arrive, rental car AC blasting cool, stale air that ruffles the both of them. It’s hot in Kentucky, too hot for Luthor to wear hose under her pencil skirt, and Kara warily observes her tapered calves with a few sidelong glances. She feels practically Victorian ogling her ankles. There’s a patch of thin, blunt hair on the side of Luthor’s right knee that she had evidently missed when shaving. Kara’s thumb itches.

“How many of these would we have done in the past four years?” Luthor asks, and Kara looks across at her in profile, watches as she brings the eraser-less end of the mechanical pencil up to rest between the strawberry slice of her lips. A vivid urge to snatch it from her and taste the lipstick that she left behind flashes through Kara’s mind. She clears her throat.

“Are you getting sentimental on me, Luthor?”

Luthor eyes her, and grins. “You wish.” She twists a strand of dark hair around her finger and offers her the paper and pencil. “You wanna finish it for me, Danvers?”

Kara tries not to blush and succeeds, mostly. She’d gotten used to Luthor’s flirting, her lilting voice, the laughter dancing behind her eyes. They’re the same greeny-blue as the Vineyard Sound was through Kara’s childhood bedroom window, the hazy blur on the horizon that salted the air when the wind blew in from the northeast. She takes the crossword from Luthor and leans against the steering wheel to write.

As is their custom, Kara quizzes her on her answers before she writes down any of her own. She’s always itching to map the path of Luthor’s thoughts, uncover another one of her many knowledges. Kara knows one of those knowledges is her – her blood type, what she’ll order from a diner at two in the morning, her birthday. Luthor knows her PIN number and how it feels to restart her heart with the heel of her hand. She’s done it more than once.

It was unlikely, however, that the NYT crossword was going to question Luthor on how many waffles Kara had eaten at the Bluejay Diner somewhere before Kansas became Missouri. She would know though.

“‘The nerves responsible for the increase and decrease of heartrate…’” Kara read, and scanned the page for Luthor’s neatly printed answer.

“Accelerans.” Luthor said, looking out the window at the field of grass to their left that undulated in the warm wind. Kara was familiar with Luthor’s studied wisdom of the body, her intimate friendship with blood and bone. Luthor was unafraid to remind anyone that yes, she can help, yes, she’s a medical doctor. Kara would sometimes ask “Hello, is this Special Agent Doctor Lena Luthor, M.D.?” when Luthor picked up her calls, just to hear her sweet laugh crackle through the speaker of her Bureau-assigned flip phone.

Kara remembers the first time she saw Luthor perform an autopsy, particularly the traitorous lurching in her stomach and trying to keep her eyes trained away from the pale V of Luthor’s neck that her scrubs revealed. There was something worshipful in the way that Luthor’s careful hands took bodies apart, whispered their secrets into her tape recorder. If Luthor’s parents had gotten their way she’d deal only with patients who still had heartbeats.

“How’d you know the number of octaves on a standard piano, Luthor?” Ending her questions with Luthor’s name was somewhat of a habit of Kara’s.

“Not something you forget after playing scales for hours on end.” That surprises Kara, and she turns a little in her seat to look at her.

“You played piano, Luthor?”

“There was one on the base at Maryland in the rec room. It was the house we stayed in for longest, I did lessons for a couple of years. Hated it.” She’s leafing through the case file now, distracted.

“Wow.” She says quietly, mostly to herself.

She could’ve been a concert pianist, with her posture. Kara can see her in a gown, back straight, hands dancing across ivory in front of a rapt crowd. And then she remembers – Luthor tapping desks and paper and sinks, in time to the radio sometimes and sometimes in silence, holding chord shapes against invisible keys. Muscle memory. Another piece to the puzzle of her in her mind. She turns back to the crossword.

“11 letters, ‘the study of bells’. Starts with ‘c’ . . . and it’ll end in ‘ology’, obviously.”

“Hmm, that one was on the tip of my tongue.” Luthor muses, inclining her head just so as if the word was going to fall loose from a corner of her brain. Kara tries not to look at the smooth edge of her jaw.

“Campanology?” It suddenly comes to Kara, and there’s an excited edge to her voice that isn’t disproportionate to Luthor’s little celebration that follows.

“That’s it!” Luthor says, nodding vigorously, eyes alight. The final clue. Kara pencils it in, the stalk of her Y running outside the boundary of the little printed box.

“Spend a lot of time in bell towers, Luthor?”

“Doing everything but ringing bells, Danvers.” Luthor fires back without missing a beat, giving her a half smile that’s _almost_ a smirk. Kara bluffs, rolling her eyes and looking away. When she’s sure Luthor can’t see she loosens her tie, hot under the collar in every sense of the phrase.

When the law arrives Kara opens Luthor’s door and Luthor shuts it herself. The ground is hot dust and the woods ahead hum with bugs and new death. There’s a body in there. They go in anyway.

She keeps her eyes on Luthor in front of her as she navigates the skinny trail, an uneasy bulk in her Kevlar. The smallest size is slightly too big across Luthor’s shoulders, fits awkwardly over her chest (Kara tries not to think about that, though). Kara’s more surefooted, ready to grab Luthor if she stumbles. Her palms sweat under her latex gloves when they both snap a pair of them on in the clearing. The scene is bad, and Luthor, attuned to her, turns and takes an exaggeratedly deep breath, encouraging Kara with her eyes to do the same. She clicks on the tape recorder.

“Alright, let’s – ” Luthor stops. There’s a sound. And there it is again, the crunch of leaves being stepped on at the edge of the clearing, just beyond the tree-line. Their right hands move in tandem to their holsters, and she hears the sheriff radio for backup. Whoever did this could still be in these woods.

“Shhh,” Kara says, and Luthor looks back at her. Kara squints at the moving shape she can see amongst the shadows, and there’s the noise again. She puts her gun away.

“Luthor, look.”

She sees the wet glisten of black eyes in the shade first. When the doe steps out into the open she can feel Luthor holding her breath. The doe’s brown flank twitches, dotted with flies. There’s grass in her mouth, new and summer sweet. She chews rhythmically. No one blinks.

The sheriff’s radio crackles and she whirls around and she’s gone again, back into the thick green. Luthor’s grinning, smiling so big Kara can see the pointy ends of her eye teeth. Kara smiles back, unable to contain the lightness in her chest that’s bloomed for her or the deer or both.

“Pretty magical, huh Danvers?” The brush of Luthor’s hand on her shoulder as she passes Kara makes her shiver.

“Yeah, pretty magical.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! and thanks for all the comments on the first chapter, i'm glad people are enjoying this fic borne mostly out of self indulgence lmao. you can talk to me about this 7000+ words of raunchy nonsense through my tumblr (@weirddyke)!

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, my tumblr is @weirddyke if you wanna yell at me about this :^)


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